This paper describes the first edition of EvaLatin, a campaign totally devoted to the evaluation of NLP tools for Latin. The two shared tasks proposed in EvaLatin 2020, i. e. Lemmatization and Part-of-Speech tagging, are aimed at fostering research in the field of language technologies for Classical languages. The shared dataset consists of texts taken from the Perseus Digital Library, processed with UDPipe models and then manually corrected by Latin experts. The training set includes only prose texts by Classical authors. The test set, alongside with prose texts by the same authors represented in the training set, also includes data relative to poetry and to the Medieval period. This also allows us to propose the Cross-genre and Cross-time subtasks for each task, in order to evaluate the portability of NLP tools for Latin across different genres and time periods. The results obtained by the participants for each task and subtask are presented and discussed.

The present work introduces a new Latin treebank that follows the Universal Dependencies (UD) annotation standard. The treebank is obtained from the automated conversion of the Late Latin Charter Treebank 2 (LLCT2), originally in the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) style. As this treebank consists of Early Medieval legal documents, its language variety differs considerably from both the Classical and Medieval learned varieties prevalent in the other currently available UD Latin treebanks. Consequently, besides significant phenomena from the perspective of diachronic linguistics, this treebank also poses several challenging technical issues for the current and future syntactic annotation of Latin in the UD framework. Some of the most relevant cases are discussed in depth, with comparisons between the original PDT and the resulting UD annotations. Additionally, an overview of the UD-style structure of the treebank is given, and some diachronic aspects of the transition from Latin to Romance languages are highlighted.

This paper describes the changes applied to the original process used to convert the Index Thomisticus Treebank, a corpus including texts in Medieval Latin by Thomas Aquinas, into the annotation style of Universal Dependencies. The changes are made both to harmonise the Universal Dependencies version of the Index Thomisticus Treebank with the two other available Latin treebanks and to fix errors and inconsistencies resulting from the original process. The paper details the treatment of different issues in PoS tagging, lemmatisation and assignment of dependency relations. Finally, it assesses the quality of the new conversion process by providing an evaluation against a gold standard.